At night you lie awake buzzing so powerfully you can’t sleep. After a couple of days of the training many women find their periods have suddenly started earlier than usual. The life trainer has warned that you will suffer from stomach cramps, and you get these, bad. The people you live with say they can’t recognize you. You smile. They say you’ve changed. Of course you have. Looking back forty-eight hours, you can’t even remember the person you were before the training started.
You’re back at the training next morning a good half hour before it starts. You want to be the first to tell the life trainer you’ve managed to hug ten people as he told you to. The others are there, too. No one has slept. Everyone is so glad to see each other. When you go inside the hall everyone swaps stories about how they hugged people on the street. Others rang their neighbors’ doorbells and said they wanted to be friends with them, phoned long-lost friends or parents they barely speak to. The ones who failed in the homework confess to failure. You attack them for being weak, victims, not transforming. The life teacher barely says anything; he just stands at the side: you’re doing it all yourselves now. And then you’re playing another game. You’re in little groups of seven all screaming at each other, “I am your aim” or “I am your obstacle,” and you have to scream past your obstacles to reach your aims. Everyone is screaming, but instead of being painful it’s like rocket fuel, and now you’ve been told to stand opposite each other and the other person is shouting at you, “What do you want? What do you want?” And it’s like that for forty minutes. Your desires start to come out of you like intestines, first cars and houses and all the easy stuff and then the silly stuff like painting the floorboards yellow or dressing up like a fairy queen, and then the really heavy stuff about wanting to hit your mother or stab the ex who dumped you. By the end you just feel free, and for the first time you can see what you really, really, really want. Then the life trainer comes out and says if you want your dreams, now that you’ve finally realized what they are, you can achieve them if you pay another $1,000 and come to the advanced course.
There’s a one-on-one consultation afterward with a volunteer. You sit at a table with that person, who says that if you sign up for the advanced course this week, then you can get a hundred dollar discount. You say, “there’s something funny with my head right now, I can’t think critically,” and the volunteer says, “but that’s good you’re not thinking critically, the trainings are all about learning not to think, your thinking holds you back, you’re learning to use your emotions, don’t you agree?”
“Yes . . . but I’m not thinking. . . . ”
“ . . . and because you’re not thinking you should sign up now. Don’t you want to live a bright life? Transform? Become effective? Take responsibility?”
And every time you hear those words your whole body starts to rush.
You delay a bit, though there are plenty who are signing on already. The next day comes the phone calls. Alex is sitting with me and the psychotherapist Vita in her office when the calls from the Rose start to come in. Alex switches on the speaker. There’s a woman from the Rose on the other end.
“Alex, don’t you want to live a bright life? Full of real emotion?”
“Of course. But I don’t have money at the moment. I’m sorry, I can’t go.”
“But that’s your challenge. Find the money. That shows you can be strong.”
Alex is half laughing: in a way the manipulation is so crass. But he doesn’t hang up.
“Come on, Alex,” says the volunteer from the Rose. “Don’t you want to change? Transform? Take responsibility?”
The words set off a Pavlovian reaction inside Alex. He starts to relive the last few days, the most intense days of his life, all his most intense experiences, most secret memories. He hangs up the phone, and though on the one hand he can tell quite clearly that the people at the Rose are toying with him, all of him is still desperate to go back there.
“Those bastards. They reach into your most sacred places and then wrap it around them.”
He starts to laugh, then cry. Then laughs again, but in a way that sounds very forced. His pupils are dilating. He seems to be splitting in two.
Ruslana and Anastasia would be called by the Rose of the World daily. When they were with friends they would get a call and then leave to talk and not come back for hours. At first their friends thought the girls were talking to boyfriends or parents; when they found out it was the Rose they were confused. Why talk to them when you’re with your friends already? One time, sitting in a London restaurant with Masha, Ruslana was talking to the Rose, then put the phone down and ran into the street and started stopping people to retie their laces. She came back grinning and slightly sweating. It wasn’t that the task they’d given her was so weird, it was just the way she dropped everything, the dinner, their conversation, to run and do their bidding.
Alex’s friends keep a close watch over him the next few days; they’re worried a call from the Rose will entice him to go back. Over the next weeks his sleep is ruined; he starts to wake up in the middle of the night and yearns to go back inside the training. Alex is the only one from the group not to have signed up for the advanced course. Every time anyone mentions words he heard inside the training he starts to feel nauseated. He dreams of the life trainer, can hear his voice.
The real problems start in about two or three months. Alex loses his appetite. He starts to skip deadlines and fuck up at work, shouts at his editor. Everything hurts. He starts to cry in the middle of the day, for no reason.
“I just can’t find my way back to myself,” Alex tells me when we meet. He’s shaved his hair off and lost weight.
At work they tell Alex he needs medical help. When Alex goes to see the doctor, he takes one look at Alex and prescribes a course of antidepressants, massages, acupuncture.
Alex had only spent one course at the Rose. Anastasia and Ruslana went back for more. Each course costs a little more than the previous one, and each one is far more intense. The volunteers and life trainers at the Rose told people they were getting better, stronger.
Anastasia at first seemed happier than ever. “I can do anything now, anything,” she told her friends. When they went out clubbing she would say, “You’ve just got to grab the guy you want, just grab him and take him.”
As the models moved further into the Rose, they were instructed to bring more pupils. This is how the Rose gets new clients: adepts are expected to bring in more people. Ruslana tried to persuade Masha. She insisted so much that Masha ended up agreeing. Then she couldn’t go after all due to a family thing. Ruslana got angry. Masha had never seen her angry. Ruslana swore. Ruslana cursed. She had never used swear words before. She’d stopped being the gentle girl Masha had known. Masha missed the old Ruslana.
Soon after Ruslana had to go back to New York for work. Anastasia kept on attending courses at the Rose. She signed on for the master course. One of her first challenges was to bring in at least twenty people, or she would be thrown out. This was her “exam”—and she failed it. Try as she might, she couldn’t get people to come. She was told she was letting everyone else down. She drifted away from the organization. That was in February. By May she was displaying all the signs of the depression that killed her. “I’ve failed,” she would say. She was a victim. She hadn’t been able to transform.
The cruelest part was that in the last half year she had met the man she always dreamed of.
Kostya picks me up in his new Maserati. He’s a former Olympic judo champ who now “works in oil.”
“Those fucking trainings fucked her up,” he says. “Every time she visited them she would come back cranky, nuts. She’d promised she’d stopped going. . . . ”
He wanted her to move in with him, was ready to settle down. But now she’d found her perfect man Anastasia couldn’t be happy with him. Her mind was starting to slip and tangle. When she and Kostya went
out on the town, she would have awful attacks of jealousy, would cry if she saw him so much as talking with other women. A month before she died he left her at his home and went off on a business trip. When he came back she was gone. She was having so many panic attacks she couldn’t stand to be alone. She told friends she would hear the voice of her friend who had died the year before. She went back to her mother, to Kiev. She kept on complaining of stomach cramps. Kostya phoned her constantly the last few days before her death. Her phone was off.
“Those fucking trainings fucked her up,” he repeats as he lets me out of the Maserati. “I’m going to get my boys to see to them.” It’s all words. He never does.
• • •
“We really gave the opportunity for Anastasia to change. But some people you can’t change. She wouldn’t let herself transform. And let’s be honest—I hear she was into drugs. Blame modeling. Her lifestyle. Not us.”
It’s taken me a while to find Volodya, the only senior person from the Rose of the World who agrees to speak to me. He was Anastasia and Ruslana’s “chairman” from the volunteer group when they attended. Now he’s branching off to start his own training. He’s only in his twenties, boyish. Wears a white track suit top and jeans. He has the slightly glazed look of the true believer. He also had a brief affair with Ruslana when she was at the Rose. I ask whether that’s normal.
“Oh, that’s normal. Happens all the time. The trainings are intense. People open up.”
“Do people ever go through depression after the Rose?”
“That’s normal. We call it a rollback. Ruslana had one. She would cry at night. Would wander about town, not knowing where she was going. You have to go through that to grow. Like turbulence on a plane as it takes off. But by the time Ruslana went back to New York in March she was okay.”
Volodya’s claims contradict what his own boss, the life trainer, said about “Ruslana”: he had argued at the training that she was a “typical victim.” When I raise this with Volodya he simply says the life trainer is confused. Ruslana wasn’t the suicidal type, he says.
“So does anyone ever have any serious medical trouble after the Rose?” I ask Volodya.
“Of course they do. That’s normal. Sometimes it can be pretty rough. Not everyone can transform. But Ruslana was now a different person. She told me she wanted to fight for money she felt was owed to her from various contracts. She was new. Look—when I first started going to the trainings I quit my job, left my girlfriend. I fought with everyone I knew; my parents still think I’m in a sect. But I’m happy. I’m real. But people around you, they can get offended when you become strong. I’m sure Ruslana was murdered. Sure of it.”
The latest tests from Ruslana’s autopsy have arrived. They say there is no new evidence pointing to her being dead before she hit the ground; the neck muscles had no injuries, the thyroid and hyoid bone of the neck had no injuries. The scleras of the eyes were white without any petechia, ruling out strangulation. Meanwhile I have been doing some background checks about the Rose. On a small corner of its Web site, behind several tabs you would never think to open, is a small reference saying the trainings are based on a discipline called Lifespring, once popular in the United States. What the site doesn’t mention are the lawsuits brought against Lifespring by former adherents for mental damage, cases that caused the US part of the organization to go bankrupt in 1980, though spin-offs would quickly reopen under different names. In Russia Lifespring is in vogue; few have heard about its past. When I contact Rick Ross in New Jersey, head of the Cult Education Forum and the world authority on Lifespring, and tell him about what happened to Alex, Anastasia, and Ruslana, he replies that he has seen the pattern dozens of times: “These organizations never blame themselves. They always say, ‘It’s the victim’s fault.’ They work like drugs: giving you peak experiences, their adherents always coming back for more. The serious problems start when people leave. The trainings have become their lives—they come back to emptiness. And just like with drugs, some will just move on. But the sensitive ones, or the ones who have any form of latent mental illness, break.”
To what extent were Lifespring courses responsible for the models’ suicides? When Anastasia’s mother meets with lawyers to ask about the possibility of opening proceedings against the Rose, she is told that proving in court that someone was forced into suicide in this case, after she is already dead and has left no accusatory letter, is nearly impossible. But what is clear is that the Rose’s advertising doesn’t provide information about the risks associated with Lifespring, and the organization preys on those members of society—young, lost women—who are vulnerable. Girls from the former Soviet bloc are particularly fragile. Six of the seven countries with the highest suicide rates among young females are former Soviet republics; Russia is sixth in the list, Kazakhstan second. Emile Durkheim once argued that suicide viruses occur at civilizational breaks, when the parents have no traditions, no value systems to pass on to their children. Thus there is no deep-seated ideology to support them when they are under emotional stress. The flip side of triumphant cynicism, of the ideology of endless shape-shifting, is despair.
“When was the last time you spoke to Ruslana?” I ask Volodya.
He pauses as he tries to recall.
“Come to think of it—it was the day she died. It was late in Moscow, I was in a bar. It was kinda loud. I asked if there was any reason for her call—could she call back later? She said there was no real reason. She just wanted to chat. She would call back. I can’t remember the exact time, but it must have been inside the last hour before her death. I think I must have been the last one to speak to her. I didn’t notice anything abnormal.”
• • •
In March Ruslana went back to New York to look for work. Her social media posts from the time mix the light and breezy with messages full of confusion and self-hatred:
“My own fault—that I allowed in. My own fault—that I fell in love. My own fault—that I allowed my heart to be broken. My own fault.”
And then:
“Life is very fragile and its flow can easily be ruined. I’m so lost: will I ever find myself?”
One day before her death, Ruslana starred in a photo shoot on a roof in midtown New York. A weird day: first rain, then sun so hot the camera burns. The photographer’s name is Erik Heck. On a final trip to New York I visit his Harlem apartment, and he shows me grainy 8mm video of Ruslana’s last day. The Ruslana I see in this shoot is completely different from her previous work. She’s a grown woman, not a fairy-tale princess. For the first time I catch a glimpse of the real person. “She’d always been told to play different roles. What I saw in her was more than that, a timeless beauty,” Heck says. “I shot her when she wasn’t watching, she had no time to pose. That’s when you get the best work. She was free.”
A day later she was dead, three days before her twenty-first birthday. Her mother is still convinced it’s murder. Each new pathology test proves nothing new, but leaves just enough room for speculation.
More than two years after her death, the Nina Ricci ad with Ruslana in it was still used in Russia, her face hanging over Moscow with “a promise of enchantment.” The perfume is a hit with teens. It smells of seductive, adult musk, mixed with childhood scents of toffee, apples, and vanilla.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SECTS IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA
The Rose of the World wasn’t the first sect I had encountered in Russia. As the Soviet Union had sunk, so sects had bubbled to the surface. Indeed, it was the Kremlin that had given them an impetus, via the power of Ostankino. In 1989 a new show appeared on Soviet TV. Instead of the usual ballet and costume dramas, the audience suddenly saw a close-up of a man with 1970s porn star looks, black hair, and even blacker eyes. He had a very deep voice. Slowly and steadily and repeatedly he instructed the viewer to breathe deeply, relax, breathe deeply. “Close your eyes. You can cure cancer or alcoholism or an
y ailment with the power of thought,” he said.
This was Anatoly Kashpirovsky. He was a professional hypnotherapist who had prepared Soviet weight-lifting teams for the Olympics. He had been brought to late Soviet TV to help keep the country calm and pacified. To keep people watching TV while everything went to shit.
His most famous lecture involved asking the audience at home to put a glass of water in front of their TV sets. Millions did. At the end of the program Kashpirovsky told the audience the water was “charged with healing energy” from his through-the-screen influence. Millions fell for this.
But Kashpirovsky was only the beginning. There was Grabovoy, who had a show on television and claimed he could raise the victims of Chechen terror attacks from the dead; there was Bronnikov, who claimed he had found a way of making the blind see with an inner vision. The sect the TNT personnel were referring to when they mentioned “communes in Siberia” was that of Vissarion, a former postal worker from Krasnodar who became convinced he was the returned Christ. In the 1990s he had founded a colony in the mountains near the border with Mongolia: “The Abode of Dawn City.” It’s still there. While still a film student I had helped out on a British documentary about it.
We flew into Abakan and drove into mountains that look like giant, frozen waves. Vissarion and his forty-five hundred followers had built their settlement up in the peaks. You have to climb for two hours to get there. There are no roads. The members of the sect live in wooden houses they built themselves, cutting down and sawing the trees. They plant their own food; they don’t drink alcohol or eat meat; and they all have clear, crystal blue eyes and powerful shoulders and look ten years younger than their actual age. As first they filled me with wonder. Then they told me they were there to wait for the apocalypse. Only their mountain would be safe when the seas flooded the earth.
“You’re lucky to have come for Christmas,” they told me.
Both the Western and Orthodox Christmas had passed.
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia Page 18